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xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

martinalderson.com

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Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#471

Post by greensh »

s08148692 wrote: post #441
bobsomers wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to deliver things fast when you don't care at all for the local communities or residents whose lives you ruin in the process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo (@ 4:08)

No it's not. That statement assumes other corps care. They don't. If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. The fact that not everyone doing it is not because everyone else is not out of the goodness of their hearts

Deeper pockets mean less regulations apply to you though. You have better lawyers and lobby.

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#472

Post by ben_w »

fluidcruft wrote: post #397
frognumber wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very unclear to me. The key question is on direction of LLMs. Right now, LLMs are taking over human jobs. If the cost of silicon+power If this applies to SWEs, lawyers, business analysts, many research scientists, .... this situation could persist for a long, long time. While capital costs less than the inputs of labor (nominal food, housing, etc.), there is no need for labor. The key question is about continued…

What I don't understand is if nobody has jobs, who's paying the machines to do anything? So okay cool you don't need people to design and build cars. Who's going to buy the cars and where exactly are they finding money? But see also the "radiologists driving to work" meme for why I think tech in general is currently getting high off their own farts.

Long term, or short term?

Short term, money physically exists and gets spent, so if you wave a magic want of oversimplification and transition all labour to AI instantly, all the money currently in bank accounts and wallets gets spend on the same businesses it was already getting spent on, a lot of which gets spent on stuff from other businesses who have in this scenario also replaced all their labour with AI.

Eventually, perhaps quickly, all this money ends up in the hands of shareholders and landlords. There's a lot of both in the economy; famously retirement funds, but smaller-scale shareholders and landlords also exist. I wouldn't want to guess what the distribution looks like, probably highly variable between countries not just social classes (the definitions of which themselves can vary between countries).

Long term, money exists as a convenient fiction to help us organise transactions of goods and services: while it may be physically possible to eat gold and banknotes, you're not getting any real nutrients out of it when you do. So in a world where goods and services come from machines, the options are too broad to forecast: humanity could be relegated to the same role and economic stature as other primates (both in and out of zoos), or we could get universal UBI denominated in machine labour credits which lets each of us live better lives than the most extravagant billionaires live today.

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#473

Post by pjc50 »

shmel wrote: post #167
AznHisoka wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone gets bailed out and the cycle starts again. Isnt this how it works?

or, hear me out, we can try the Irish way? Just let them fail ffs

Irish banking was bailed out at huge expense by the Irish taxpayer, a loan of the value of 40% of GDP at the time: https://www.irishpost.com/business/ireland-sells-the-last-of...

(note: Allied Irish Banks and Anglo Irish Bank are different organizations with the same initials; the latter is the massively fraudulent one run by Sean Quinn who did eventually see a small amount of jail time)

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#474

Post by ben_w »

paulhebert wrote: post #390
frognumber wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very unclear to me. The key question is on direction of LLMs. Right now, LLMs are taking over human jobs. If the cost of silicon+power If this applies to SWEs, lawyers, business analysts, many research scientists, .... this situation could persist for a long, long time. While capital costs less than the inputs of labor (nominal food, housing, etc.), there is no need for labor. The key question is about continued…

> what rational reason is there to employ a human being? To maintain a functioning society and social contract? Is wanting low unemployment in our society not rational?

> Is wanting low unemployment in our society not rational?

Only conditionally on there being bad consequences for high unemployment.

I don't particularly trust politicians, but there's a whole host of hypothetical scenarios about futures where work is essentially optional. Unfortunately, they're all either in the sci-fi or religion sections of the book store:

Despite people occasionally investigating UBI, the efforts to research UBI seriously have the same problems that Marx had with literal Communism, in that there's an obvious difference between any partial transition as compared to a global transition, and we don't have a completely disconnected parallel world to be a petri dish for us to test the economic outcomes on.

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#475

Post by oblio »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #414
oblio wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but far from making no sense. When I said "it makes no sense", I didn't mean "the accounting math doesn't work out". I meant "raising a potential conflict of interest among related parties". This whole AI financing this is the motherlode of "potential conflict of interest among related parties". And people who are obtuse enough to ignore this because it's not illegal right now will discover 5-10 years from now that…

> whole AI financing this is the motherlode of "potential conflict of interest among related parties" Sure? Lots of things are potential conflicts. In the Google and Anthropic deals, I'm not seeing evidence of problems. And that's saying something, because we have a lot of evidence of actual circularity or related-party deals being done with no arms-length anything across AI, in many cases in ways that definitely do…

> Sure? Lots of things are potential conflicts. In the Google and Anthropic deals, I'm not seeing evidence of problems.

And that's where my video comes in. Google and Amazon are very likely juicing up their share price. Of course, in this day and age we can't prove it's a pump and dump anymore...

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#476

Post by nl »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #462
nl wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compute is also a rapidly depreciating asset. That's the default assumption but in the new GPU+Memory constrained age isn't true. Time on 4 year old H100 servers costs more now than when they were new (!!)

> Time on 4 year old H100 servers costs more now than when they were new (!!) There are several confounding factors. We’ve seen massive inflation since then. So some growth in cost was expected. More importantly, the current Tech industry almost always starts by selling things at a loss. The increased cost could simply be the industry choosing to not subsidize that particular service anymore. But also, I don’t think…

> Rented out GPUs are likely not a similar use profile as compute used for training LLMs. The latter is likely closer to the cryptocurrency GPUs that are running at full tilt 24/7.

This is untrue.

H100's are used for training (well were, but are now outdated because B100/B200s are much faster).

Most of the reason people rent H100s is for smaller training runs.

If you are doing inference you usually buy managed capacity at Baseten or something, and that is often priced differently (although it comes down to an extra margin on longer term H100 prices basically).

Inference utilization is often actually higher than training now because so much effort has been spent on optimizing that stack.

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#477

Post by ben_w »

ForHackernews wrote: post #468
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anything to read on how the economics of an orbital datacenter make any sense? I'll do a write-up at some point. But the core drivers are launch cost, permitting delays for terrestrial datacentres and interest rates. The balance is between, on one hand, the financing cost of the permiting delays against, on the other hand, the cost of launching radiators. (Chips are light. Solar panels without glass cladding are su…

> permitting delays for terrestrial datacentres "Well, you didn't want a data centre in the field near your town, so instead we'll rain astrocentere debris across the western hemisphere and set off a Kessler syndrome cascade. Thank god we didn't have to wait for a permit."

I get the point, but if society cared about globally distributed pollution more than about money, we've have transitioned to renewables and EVs a decade or three earlier.

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#478

Post by ReptileMan »

overgard wrote: post #343

AFAIK the Colossus data center was more or less "brute force" when it comes to building a datacenter fast -- ie it was very expensive and they cut some pretty ugly corners (their generators are "temporary" to get around regulations, but I don't see how they can possibly be "temporary" and they create a massive amount of pollution compared to other power sources). The reason I point that out is the article mentions th…

>but I don't see how they can possibly be "temporary"

Fairly simple. You put 16 turbines that don't require permit for a year. After a year has passed you put another 16 pulled from another site and move the initial 16 to the former empty one.

Then you lobby hard to make sure that the authorities read temporary per turbine serial number and not total installed capacity.

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#479

Post by entropi »

bobsomers wrote: post #322
blactuary wrote: post #308

Writing this: > In comparison, SpaceX/xAI are incredible at building datacentres on time. The original Colossus 1 datacentre was built in 122 days. Musk's empire does have a huge advantage in really understanding how to plan, build and execute enormous infrastructure projects quickly Without even mentioning that it was done illegally and the air pollution they are creating with gas turbines is wildly irresponsible

It's easy to deliver things fast when you don't care at all for the local communities or residents whose lives you ruin in the process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo (@ 4:08)

I think the point is not difficulty but rather recklessness. I don't think other large players lack the ability or the deep pockets to do the same, but they might be lacking on the recklessness department for whatever reason. That reason, whatever it may be, might be the interesting part here.

Re: xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab

#480

Post by tirant »

hackyhacky wrote: post #425
paulhebert wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what rational reason is there to employ a human being? To maintain a functioning society and social contract? Is wanting low unemployment in our society not rational?

Correct. Unfortunately, that's not how capitalism makes decisions.

Capitalism does not decide anything. Capitalism allows individuals to take decisions in a free market.

If you want to complain about selfishness then do it on selfish individuals, which by the way, are present in all types of economic systems.

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